1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to billing systems in wireless communication networks. More particularly, embodiments of the invention relate to systems and methods for evaluating the performance of billing systems in wireless cellular networks.
2. The Relevant Technology
The convenience and popularity of mobile or wireless devices is undeniable and their use continues to increase as more users obtain wireless devices and as wireless service becomes available in new areas. Not surprisingly, there is significant competition among the various providers or carriers of wireless services. In fact, many of these carriers either have their own wireless network or they have agreements with other carriers to use their wireless networks. These agreements effectively extend the scope of a carrier's own network.
The end effect of these arrangements between carriers is evident on the various calling plans that are offered to end users. Many calling plans have a defined home calling area and many wireless calls often originate and end within the home calling area. If a call is made or received outside of the home calling area, however, the user is not precluded from wireless service. Rather, the user may accrue long distance and/or roaming fees to his or her account. Other calling plans provide nationwide service. This does not mean, however, that a wireless device cannot roam on other networks or use other networks during use. The absence of roaming fees further does not mean that a user is always operating on the carrier's own network.
Wireless carriers provide access to their networks for a fee that is either recurring monthly (post paid) or charged immediately to an account associated with the user (pre-paid). Regardless of the specifics, customers are generally billed for events (calls, text messages, and other chargeable actions). Regardless of whether a customer is using the post-paid or pre-paid model, it is necessary to collect the data from many different records in order to bill a customer successfully.
In the post-paid model, for example, all of the calls made by a user are monitored by the carrier. When the allowable minutes are exceeded, the user may begin to accrue charges on a per minute basis. Similarly, messaging requires monitoring the bandwidth consumed by a user or the total number of messages sent by a user. When one considers that there are 10s to 100s or millions of cellular devices in use making billions of calls per month, sending messages, and performing other chargeable events, the complexity of a carrier's billing system becomes apparent. However, this is only the beginning of the complexity because of the fact that some uses of cellular devices may involve the networks of multiple carriers, affiliates and operators. In order to correctly charge the end user, a billing system for a given carrier is required to process data from thousands of network elements, from the billing carrier itself, from affiliated yet independent carriers and from other roaming partners that have minimal relationships with the primary carrier. After collecting this data, it then becomes necessary to process the collected data and then ultimately generate a bill for each customer of the carrier. As can be appreciated, the billing system of a wireless carrier is very complex to operate and maintain.
In the pre-paid model, it is still necessary to collect the same type of information that is collected in the post-paid model. The primary difference relates to how the user is billed based on the data collected by the carrier. In the pre-paid model, for example, the user may purchase an amount of minutes. If the user exceeds this limit, the user may accrue additional minute charges that are then billed to the user, taking into account that the user has already paid for some services. In the post-paid model, the user is billed after the fact for the entire amount. Regardless of the billing scheme used by a carrier, any billing performed by the carrier is ultimately tied to the collected data and to usage of the device.
Not surprisingly, some records or data are inevitably lost in such a complex system. This can occur for a variety of different reasons. Some of the systems or system elements, for example, are not configured correctly or have errors in their implementation. Partners or affiliated networks may not correctly report information to the primary billing carrier or have errors in their system elements. As a result, wrong data, missing data, or incorrect processing results in transactions or events that are not properly represented, missing and unaccounted for, or simply wrong. The distributed nature of the various systems and networks that interact in order to acquire the data needed to generate a bill makes it difficult to systematically correct these types of issues or problems that occur in wireless networks and associated billing systems.
In addition to simply missing data, information may also be corrupted during processing or generation. If a network element incorrectly timestamps a record for example, the calculation of call duration can be skewed, resulting in incorrect bills. While the actual errors for individual calls may be limited, the resulting billing error accrued over billions of calls can be significant.
In order to resolve these issues, improve the quality and accuracy of bills and charges, and ultimately either generate more revenue (in the case of under charging) or reduce liability (in the case of over charging), it is desirable to have a mechanism for auditing the accuracy of the billing transactions. However, the only source of data associated with the call are the very same systems that are used to generate the records in the first place.